The OTTER project was supposed to produce 360 credits’ worth of teaching resources and was able to exceed this funding requirement, producing 438 credits' worth of teaching materials (Witthaus and Armellini, 2010). Following the success of OTTER, the University of Leicester team received additional funding from the OTTER funders, JISC and HEA, to cascade and transfer the outcomes of the OTTER project to the Universities of Derby and Bath. The subsequent project, OER Sustainability through Teaching and Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs (OSTRICH), entailed Leicester providing leadership and direction to the other two universities, and sharing templates8 used in OTTER. Besides the release of materials worth 210 credits and the current development of materials equivalent to another 85 credits, OSTRICH also modified the process workflow framework developed for OTTER. Further, a useful guide on “scaffolding”9 other OER project teams through OER adoption and implementation has been developed (Witthaus, Armellini, Gagen, & Jenkins, 2011), and provides a useful starting point for other institutions wanting to follow this mentorship model of materials conversion and open sharing. As an example of a discrete project, since 2009, the University of Cape Town (UCT) Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) has been running a pilot project on health OER development and use, funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, under a grant co-managed by OER Africa and University of Michigan. The Education Development Unit (EDU) in the FHS is responsible for co-ordinating this project, which involves solicitation of teaching materials from faculty, and assisting with relevant activities to prepare these resources for sharing as OER. To date, the initiative has completed nine OER and is working on ten more to be released in 2012. The health OER work is driven by a small team of OER champions, most of them employed on a part-time basis, who, in addition to running advocacy workshops, approach lecturers who have good teaching materials and encourage them to release these as OER. In another example of a discrete initiative at UCT, the Centre for Higher Education and Development (CHED) Academic Development Unit (ADU) modified an existing booklet for first-year students and released it as an OER.10 This guide had first been published in 1998 as a booklet for students and consisted of printed text bound together and handed out to students. A lecturer from CHED was responsible for rewriting the guide, with the assistance of other colleagues for translation. A graphic artist from the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) was responsible for illustrations, and CET technical staff took care of the packaging and web publishing of the resource. Also initiated in 2009 as part of the same Hewlett Foundation grant funding for the UCT FHS health OER initiative, the University of Ghana (UG) College of Health Sciences (CHS) health OER initiative involves developing materials from scratch (see Chapter 4 by Omollo, Rahman and Yebuah), as well as converting existing teaching materials into OER. The latter are sourced from faculty, with the dedicated co-ordination of one of the lecturers who has also shared his teaching materials as OER. This lecturer works with a small team of three technologists, who assist with any technical conversions required on the materials before they are released. To date, ten teaching resources have been converted to OER and the team is working on seven more.
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